Article excerpt

The Newark International Airport People Mover is a monorail system that serves as part of a vast network of mass transit systems in the New Jersey area. It is being completed in two phases. The first, finished in 1996, involved building the parking lots and monorail stations so that patrons could park their cars and ride the monorail to the airport. The second phase, now in production, will connect the monorail with railway stations in the northeast. This next phase will increase the number of people using the system.

The AEG Monorail and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey wanted to ensure that passengers would have a way to call for emergency assistance if needed. To address that concern, the system designers planned to install an emergency phone system as a vital part of the monorail's security system. They wanted the emergency phones installed by the time the monorail was operational.

Paul Chambers, senior design engineer at AEG, began researching emergency phone systems while the monorail was still on the drawing board. He chose the T800 series of phones manufactured by Vandal-Proof Products, Inc. (Vpp), in Trenton, New Jersey. "After checking out several options," says Chambers, he concluded that "the Vpp devices were the best emergency phones available for the price." Installation began as soon as the monorail stations were completed.

AEG purchased two types of emergency communication instruments from Vpp: 151 of the T810 model phones are installed aboard the monorail cars, and 40 of the T820 models are used in the monorail stations. …